Vista Jury Awards Chiropractor $7.5 Million After Starbucks Floor Slip and Brain Injury
Won by Gomez Trial Attorneys.
A San Diego County jury ordered Starbucks to pay roughly $7.5 million after chiropractor Anthony Zaccaglin slipped on a freshly mopped store floor, struck his head, and suffered a brain injury that ended his career.
What happened
In March 2008, Anthony Zaccaglin walked into a Starbucks on Melrose Avenue in Vista, California, to pick up a drink. A store manager had just mopped the tile floor. As Zaccaglin crossed from the register toward the pickup counter, he slipped and hit his head.
Zaccaglin, a working chiropractor, went to a doctor the next day with persistent headaches, nausea, and head pain. He was diagnosed with a concussion. Later examinations found mild traumatic brain injury that required more than a year of brain-injury therapy. Severe headaches, extreme fatigue, and medication side effects kept him from going back to the practice he ran. He and his wife filed suit the following year.
John Gomez and The Gomez Law Firm took the case to a jury in San Diego County Superior Court in Vista. One of the central fights was over warnings. The store manager testified that she had set out three cones around the wet area. Witnesses said they saw only one, and it was not positioned at the spot where Zaccaglin went down. An employee later apologized for not dry mopping after the wet pass, a second step that removes the film of water a wet mop leaves behind. Gomez argued that the company's safety policies were inadequate and applied inconsistently from store to store, and that the fall caused exactly the kind of head injury those rules existed to prevent.
The defense disputed how badly Zaccaglin was hurt and how the fall happened. Before trial, according to Gomez, Starbucks never offered more than $100,000 to settle the claim. Zaccaglin turned that down and went to verdict.
On December 23, 2011, the jury sided with the family. It awarded Zaccaglin $6,456,230.50 for losses that included lost income, medical expenses, and the loss of enjoyment of life, and awarded his wife, Lisa, $1 million for loss of consortium, bringing the total to about $7.5 million.
In a statement after the verdict, Starbucks said it had made every effort to reach a reasonable settlement and was reviewing the decision to determine what steps, if any, it might take. Public verdict records list the result as a $7.5 million plaintiff's verdict, with no reduction or remittitur noted.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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Related slip & fall verdicts
A Cook County jury awarded $32 million to truck driver Stephanie Johnson, who developed Complex Regional Pain Syndrome after slipping on oil at an ExxonMobil facility, in what the Jury Verdict Reporter recorded as the largest CRPS verdict in Illinois history.
After a neurosurgeon slipped on a wet hospital pantry floor and developed reflex sympathetic dystrophy that ended his surgical career, an Evansville jury found St. Mary's Medical Center fully at fault and awarded $16.95 million, a verdict the Indiana Court of Appeals later affirmed.
A Clark County jury held Lowe's responsible after Kelly Hendrickson slipped on liquid draining from store planters, fractured her skull, and permanently lost her senses of taste and smell.
A King County jury awarded Lesley Mettler Auld $13.1 million after she slipped on an algae-covered Seattle sidewalk in July 2021 and ruptured both quadriceps tendons. Jurors found both the City of Seattle and 14th & Dravus LLC, the owner of the adjacent apartment building, negligent, and split the fault 52 percent to the property owner and 48 percent to the city over an overgrown hedge that shaded the walkway and the moss and algae that grew under it. Auld, a longtime personal trainer and 14-time Ironman finisher, had three surgeries to repair the tendons, and her examining physicians said she would need at least three more operations on her right knee and could lose the right leg above the knee if those failed. The Washington Court of Appeals affirmed the judgment in March 2026, and 14th & Dravus has since asked the state Supreme Court to take up the case.